Pros Say: Expect More 'Sell on News' Activity

So far, it hasn't been a September to remember on Wall Street. With three days in the books, the month is living up to its historic billing as the worst month of the year for stock investors, though Wednesday's losses were relatively small. Read and listen to what the pros had to say...

Brace For a Weaker September

We are going to see a weaker September, said Chris Johnson of Johnson Research Group. “We had good news flowing into the market, but we had investors pulling money out on ‘sell the news,’” he said. “Stocks are overpriced because investors have been piling in … but I think we’re going to see some more ‘sell the news’ activity, especially depending upon what we see from the employment report tomorrow.”

"There was an audible gasp in the trading room," Steve Massocca of Wedbush Morgan said on Philadelphia Fed President Plosser's comments that the Fed will have to raise rates as rapidlyas it cut them. "This is all extremely premature," he said. “At some point in the future, it will be discussed and it will be a matter of conversation … but we’re nowhere near there yet in my opinion.”

We could see a return to market fundamentals in September, according to Clive Lambert at FuturesTechs. He sees stocks paring back slightly. “I don’t see a return to the March levels, the lows are in, but we might give back a fair chunk of what we saw in July because it wasn’t built on any real solid foundations,” he said.

Looking at credit spreads, volatility, and TED spreads, they’re not only back to where they were before the Lehman Brothers crisis, they’re better than average in some cases and so the financial crisis is over, said Marshall Gittler from Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management. "Liquidity is flowing again ... now we're just back to a bog-standard recession," he said.

Until there is an economic recovery, governments should keep the monetary stimulus flowing, according to Lord Robert Skidelsky, author of Keynes: The Return of the Master. “As long as there’s a slide going on, you need to stimulate the market,” he said.